The Plot Twist Every Writer Misses

Structure Isn’t Just Editing

Outlining is what most people do (those who outline at all). Structuring is what people should be doing, whether they do it before, during, or after writing. O

utlining is vague, or can be vague and concentrates on the steps and may be random or unrefined. Structuring is specific and intentional.

Let me give you a not-so-hyperbolic example.

Outline:

• We meet Luke, palling around with his friends, whining about how he has to stay on Tatooine.

• We meet Leia. She is captured by stormtroopers.

• We meet Darth Vader.

• The droids, who’ve escaped with the Death Star plans, crashland on Tatooine, and are captured by Jawas.

• The droids end up with Luke who is tasked with cleaning them for use on the farm. Luke discovers Leia’s message.

• Luke chases down R2D2 who has escaped during the night.

• We meet Obi-Wan Kenobi who explains things to Luke.

• Owen and Beru are killed by stormtroopers.

• Luke decides to go with Kenobi.

• We meet Han Solo and Chewbacca.

• Kenobi and Solo work out a deal and they part ways.

• Solo goes back to his ship where Jabba is waiting for him; Jabba threatens him.

• Lots of stuff happens and finally …

• Luke destroys the Death Star.

I concentrated on the beginning here because in this case, structuring the story actually happened in real life, but after it was filmed. This is where it was “saved in editing.” And again, I’m not representing that Lucas or his people sat down with the intent to “structure” anything. I just know that the editing ended up making changes that resulted in the final product that are (mostly) compliant with Jeffrey Schechter’s My Story Can Beat Up Your Story (MSCBUYS; affiliate link). We could argue about whether it was cart or horse and which came first, but we won’t because it doesn’t matter to this exercise.

Structuring happens before, during, and after writing, depending on the writer. When it happens after, it’s called editing (whether it’s called a structural edit or not).

When it happens during, it’s called cycling, or edit-as-you-go.

When it happens before, it’s called “outlining” though it’s not—not really.

Even if you were the kind of writer who could sit down from the start and fill in everything as you go (chart below), do you write it beginning to end with no editing at all? Any time you “edit” by moving or deleting or adding scenes or making changes to scene 15 so that the item in scene 257 makes sense, you are re-structuring or editing your story, whether it’s in written or outline form.

If, at this point you’re going, “But wait, you got the Star Wars outline wrong.” you get a gold star. It’s not so much as I got it wrong but I gave it to you how it was “originally” laid out. At this point the script had been, undoubtedly, through several revisions, and I say that with some confidence since “making a movie” is far more collaborative than what we do when we write a novel. There are a lot more fingers in the movie pie than your typical novel pie. But this is the screenplay version that matters to us in our exploration of outline versus structure.

As writers we are lucky in that it’s cheap to “edit” or “tweak” our work, as opposed to “editing” a movie that’s already been filmed thus limiting “edits” to what was on celluloid. No wonder it won an Oscar for editing.

Now, there is some controversy over this “saved in the edit” because all movies are “saved in the edit,” but for our purposes, we’re going to ignore this (it’s really not useful but if you’re into this kind of thing, just do a search for it and you’ll see that it’s a topic among aficionados).

Here is a treatise on how the movie was edited (but not the editing controversy) if you want the details on how they changed the sequencing:

If you want a really good argument for why you should not show your WiP to anyone, this was it right here, but I digress…

Instead, we will talk about the sequence that was edited after filming. The one that actually happened, hence the Oscar.

The outline item “We meet Luke, palling around with his friends, whining about how they get to leave and he has to stay.” certainly meets the requirement of a Plot Point 1 (PP01, MSCBUYS) since it has us meeting the protagonist (Luke) in his ordinary world, but it is a boring one despite the “conflict” thrown into it. The conflict in this case has to do with Luke’s wants, needs, or desires, as is appropriate in every way, just so we’re clear on this point. He wants to get off Tatooine and go the Imperial Academy to become a pilot.

The outline item “We meet Leia. She is captured by stormtroopers.” is definitely a Plot point 2 (PP02, MSCBUYS) because she is the Stakes Character and PP02 says we meet her next.

The outline item “We meet Darth Vader.” is definitely a Plot Point 3 (PP03, MSCBUYS) because this is where we meet the Antagonist or someone representative of the antagonistic force. In this case, Darth Vader is the representative, not the Antagonist.

So even though we have, structurally, the right sequence in terms of whom we introduce in order, the decision was made to cut and re-order the scenes so that we meet the representative of the antagonistic force first, via the fleeing Rebel ship being fired upon. This is still PP01 compliant since we can start either with the protagonist or the antagonist (or in this case the antagonist victimizing the stakes character). Then we meet Leia, so PP02 (meeting the stakes character) stays in place. PP03 becomes Darth Vader threatening Leia, which is also compliant with the definition of that plot-point.

Then we get the droids crashing on Tatooine and being captured by Jawas.

We don’t meet the protagonist until PP04 where we meet Luke in the scene where his uncle purchases the two droids. In this scene where “a Deflector (Owen) diverts the hero from his goal” we don’t really have a proper PP04 because we don’t know what Luke’s goal is. That was cut out with the editing but may be obvious due to the hype surrounding the movie. We don’t know Luke’s goal because, technically, we just met him. So, it’s not a proper PP04, but it meets the definition somewhat, in retrospect once you figure out that Luke is the protagonist. Some people will argue that the droids crash landing and being captured by Jawas is PP04, but how does that mean the actual definition of PP04? The droids are not the protagonists.

A bit later, Luke discovers the message from Leia in PP05 (where the hero gets emotionally involved or the audience does on the hero’s behalf).

This restructuring leads to a new outline or sequence of events, keeping to what the various plot-points need to be, more or less.

The fact that we had PP01, PP02, PP03, PP04, and PP05 in the order that they have to be in, doing the things we need them to do, whether or not there are connecting scenes in between, is Structure, not outline. All Structures are outlines, but not all outlines are structured. Do you see the difference now?

Another scene that was deleted was the Han Solo and Jabba scene. My understanding is that it was cut for time, and for our purposes we can look at it that way too, i.e. pacing. But there’s a more important reason to cut it. Structurally, it does nothing for the story. We already know that Solo is worried about the threats Jabba made. This is a story subplot item, one that shows what’s already been told, but ultimately, not necessary.

I talked about subplots here:

The cutting of the Han-Jabba scene is a very good example of whether or not something is a subplot as opposed to a story thread that’s part of the A-, B-, or C-lines.

I know that Lucas put the Han-Jabba scene back in, along with changing the fact that “Han shot first” but we won’t talk about the Star Wars we used to know.

Fortunately for us as writers, these kinds of edits are (arguably) easier to make. They may be hard to figure out, how to make sure that continuity isn’t screwed up when we reorder scenes or events, rename people or places, etc, but at least we didn’t spend tens of thousands of dollars a minute to film it. Just make the changes before publication.